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The full documentation for Reticulum is available at markqvist.github.io/Reticulum/manual/.

You can also download the Reticulum manual as a PDF

For more info, see reticulum.network

• Coordination-less globally unique addressing and identification

• Fully self-configuring multi-hop routing

• Initiator anonymity, communicate without revealing your identity

• Asymmetric X25519 encryption and Ed25519 signatures as a basis for all communication

• Forward Secrecy with ephemeral Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman keys on Curve25519

• Reticulum uses the Fernet specification for on-the-wire / over-the-air encryption

• Keys are ephemeral and derived from an ECDH key exchange on Curve25519

• AES-128 in CBC mode with PKCS7 padding

• HMAC using SHA256 for authentication

• IVs are generated through os.urandom()

• Unforgeable packet delivery confirmations

• A variety of supported interface types

• An intuitive and easy-to-use API

• Reliable and efficient transfer of arbitrary amounts of data

• Reticulum can handle a few bytes of data or files of many gigabytes

• Sequencing, transfer coordination and checksumming are automatic

• The API is very easy to use, and provides transfer progress

• Lightweight, flexible and expandable Request/Response mechanism

• Efficient link establishment

• Total bandwidth cost of setting up an encrypted link is 3 packets totaling 297 bytes

• Low cost of keeping links open at only 0.44 bits per second

While Reticulum is already a fully featured and functional networking stack, many improvements and additions are actively being worked on, and planned for the future.

To learn more about the direction and future of Reticulum, please see the Development Roadmap.

If you want to quickly get an idea of what Reticulum can do, take a look at the

following resources.

• You can use the rnsh program to establish remote shell sessions over Reticulum.

• For an off-grid, encrypted and resilient mesh communications platform, see Nomad Network

• The Android, Linux and macOS app Sideband has a graphical interface and focuses on ease of use.

• LXMF is a distributed, delay and disruption tolerant message transfer protocol built on Reticulum

Over practically any medium that can support at least a half-duplex channel

with 500 bits per second throughput, and an MTU of 500 bytes. Data radios,

modems, LoRa radios, serial lines, AX.25 TNCs, amateur radio digital modes,

WiFi and Ethernet devices, free-space optical links, and similar systems are

all examples of the types of physical devices Reticulum can use.

An open-source LoRa-based interface called

RNode has

been designed specifically for use with Reticulum. It is possible to build

yourself, or it can be purchased as a complete transceiver that just needs a

USB connection to the host.

Reticulum can also be encapsulated over existing IP networks, so there's

nothing stopping you from using it over wired Ethernet, your local WiFi network

or the Internet, where it'll work just as well. In fact, one of the strengths

of Reticulum is how easily it allows you to connect different mediums into a

self-configuring, resilient and encrypted mesh, using any available mixture of

available infrastructure.

As an example, it's possible to set up a Raspberry Pi connected to both a LoRa

radio, a packet radio TNC and a WiFi network. Once the interfaces are

configured, Reticulum will take care of the rest, and any device on the WiFi

network can communicate with nodes on the LoRa and packet radio sides of the

network, and vice versa.

The best way to get started with the Reticulum Network Stack depends on what

you want to do. For full details and examples, have a look at the

Getting Started Fast

section of the Reticulum Manual.

To simply install Reticulum and related utilities on your system, the easiest way is via pip:

T282828

You can then start any program that uses Reticulum, or start Reticulum as a

system service with the rnsd utility.

When first started, Reticulum will create a default configuration file,

providing basic connectivity to other Reticulum peers that might be locally

reachable. The default config file contains a few examples, and references for

creating a more complex configuration.

If you have an old version of T383838pip on your system, you may need to upgrade it first with T383838pip install pip --upgrade. If you no not already have T383838pip installed, you can install it using the package manager of your system with T383838sudo apt install python3-pip or similar.

For more detailed examples on how to expand communication over many mediums such

as packet radio or LoRa, serial ports, or over fast IP links and the Internet using

the UDP and TCP interfaces, take a look at the Supported Interfaces

section of the Reticulum Manual.

Reticulum includes a range of useful utilities for managing your networks,

viewing status and information, and other tasks. You can read more about these

programs in the Included Utility Programs

section of the Reticulum Manual.

• The system daemon T383838rnsd for running Reticulum as an always-available service

• An interface status utility called T383838rnstatus, that displays information about interfaces

• The path lookup and management tool T383838rnpath letting you view and modify path tables

• A diagnostics tool called T383838rnprobe for checking connectivity to destinations

• A simple file transfer program called T383838rncp making it easy to copy files to remote systems

• The remote command execution program T383838rnx let's you run commands and

programs and retrieve output from remote systems

All tools, including T383838rnx and T383838rncp, work reliably and well even over very

low-bandwidth links like LoRa or Packet Radio.

Reticulum implements a range of generalised interface types that covers most of

the communications hardware that Reticulum can run over. If your hardware is

not supported, it's relatively simple to implement an interface class. I will

gratefully accept pull requests for custom interfaces if they are generally

useful.

Currently, the following interfaces are supported:

• Any Ethernet device

• LoRa using RNode

• Packet Radio TNCs (with or without AX.25)

• KISS-compatible hardware and software modems

• Any device with a serial port

• TCP over IP networks

• UDP over IP networks

• External programs via stdio or pipes

• Custom hardware via stdio or pipes

Reticulum targets a very wide usable performance envelope, but prioritises

functionality and performance on low-bandwidth mediums. The goal is to

provide a dynamic performance envelope from 250 bits per second, to 1 gigabit

per second on normal hardware.

Currently, the usable performance envelope is approximately 500 bits per second

to 20 megabits per second, with physical mediums faster than that not being

saturated. Performance beyond the current level is intended for future

upgrades, but not highly prioritised at this point in time.

Reticulum should currently be considered beta software. All core protocol

features are implemented and functioning, but additions will probably occur as

real-world use is explored. There will be bugs. The API and wire-format can be

considered relatively stable at the moment, but could change if warranted.

The installation of the default T383838rns package requires the dependencies listed

below. Almost all systems and distributions have readily available packages for

these dependencies, and when the T383838rns package is installed with T383838pip, they

will be downloaded and installed as well.

• PyCA/cryptography

• netifaces

• pyserial

On more unusual systems, and in some rare cases, it might not be possible to

install or even compile one or more of the above modules. In such situations,

you can use the T383838rnspure package instead, which require no external

dependencies for installation. Please note that the contents of the T383838rns and

T383838rnspure packages are identical. The only difference is that the T383838rnspure

package lists no dependencies required for installation.

No matter how Reticulum is installed and started, it will load external

dependencies only if they are needed and available. If for example you want

to use Reticulum on a system that cannot support

pyserial, it is perfectly possible to

do so using the T383838rnspure package, but Reticulum will not be able to use

serial-based interfaces. All other available modules will still be loaded when

needed.

Please Note! If you use the T383838rnspure package to run Reticulum on systems

that do not support PyCA/cryptography,

it is important that you read and understand the [Cryptographic

Primitives](#cryptographic-primitives) section of this document.

If you just want to get started experimenting without building any physical

networks, you are welcome to join the Unsigned.io RNS Testnet. The testnet is

just that, an informal network for testing and experimenting. It will be up

most of the time, and anyone can join, but it also means that there's no

guarantees for service availability.

The testnet runs the very latest version of Reticulum (often even a short while

before it is publicly released). Sometimes experimental versions of Reticulum

might be deployed to nodes on the testnet, which means strange behaviour might

occur. If none of that scares you, you can join the testnet via either TCP or

I2P. Just add one of the following interfaces to your Reticulum configuration

file:

T282828

The testnet also contains a number of Nomad Network nodes, and LXMF propagation nodes.

You can help support the continued development of open, free and private communications systems by donating via one of the following channels:

• Monero:

T282828

• Ethereum

T282828

• Bitcoin

T282828

• Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/markqvist

Are certain features in the development roadmap are important to you or your

organisation? Make them a reality quickly by sponsoring their implementation.

Reticulum uses a simple suite of efficient, strong and modern cryptographic

primitives, with widely available implementations that can be used both on

general-purpose CPUs and on microcontrollers. The necessary primitives are:

• Ed25519 for signatures

• X22519 for ECDH key exchanges

• HKDF for key derivation

• Modified Fernet for encrypted tokens

• AES-128 in CBC mode

• HMAC for message authentication

• No Fernet version and timestamp fields

• SHA-256

• SHA-512

In the default installation configuration, the T383838X25519, T383838Ed25519 and

T383838AES-128-CBC primitives are provided by OpenSSL

(via the PyCA/cryptography package).

The hashing functions T383838SHA-256 and T383838SHA-512 are provided by the standard

Python hashlib. The T383838HKDF,

T383838HMAC, T383838Fernet primitives, and the T383838PKCS7 padding function are always

provided by the following internal implementations:

• HKDF.py

• HMAC.py

• Fernet.py

• PKCS7.py

Reticulum also includes a complete implementation of all necessary primitives

in pure Python. If OpenSSL & PyCA are not available on the system when

Reticulum is started, Reticulum will instead use the internal pure-python

primitives. A trivial consequence of this is performance, with the OpenSSL

backend being much faster. The most important consequence however, is the

potential loss of security by using primitives that has not seen the same

amount of scrutiny, testing and review as those from OpenSSL.

If you want to use the internal pure-python primitives, it is **highly

advisable** that you have a good understanding of the risks that this pose, and

make an informed decision on whether those risks are acceptable to you.

Reticulum is relatively young software, and should be considered as such. While

it has been built with cryptography best-practices very foremost in mind, it

has not been externally security audited, and there could very well be

privacy or security breaking bugs. If you want to help out, or help sponsor an

audit, please do get in touch.

Reticulum can only exist because of the mountain of Open Source work it was

built on top of, the contributions of everyone involved, and everyone that has

supported the project through the years. To everyone who has helped, thank you

so much.

A number of other modules and projects are either part of, or used by

Reticulum. Sincere thanks to the authors and contributors of the following

projects:

• PyCA/cryptography, BSD License

• Pure-25519 by Brian Warner, MIT License

• Pysha2 by Thom Dixon, MIT License

• Python-AES by Or Gur Arie, MIT License

• Curve25519.py by Nicko van Someren, Public Domain

• I2Plib by Viktor Villainov

• PySerial by Chris Liechti, BSD License

• Netifaces by Alastair Houghton, MIT License

• Configobj by Michael Foord, Nicola Larosa, Rob Dennis & Eli Courtwright, BSD License

• Six by Benjamin Peterson, MIT License

• Umsgpack.py by Ivan A. Sergeev

• Python